Eugene’s housing philosophy is from a bygone era. We need a new approach.

This is the first in a three-part series on “conservative urbanism” as a governing standard. It asks how Eugene can keep its values while building enough homes for the people who live here and the people arriving.

Eugene has long seen itself as a city that chose limits on purpose. Long before housing shortages and affordability crises dominated local headlines, the city built an identity around restraint: environmental protection, neighborhood preservation and skepticism toward unchecked growth.

Those instincts were not fringe beliefs; they were civic values, reinforced through decades of land-use planning, public rules and public processes. For a long time, that bargain fit the conditions of the era.

The question now is not whether Eugene should keep those values. It’s whether our governing systems can still deliver them under tighter land, stronger housing demand and higher stakes — without pricing families out or pushing them farther away.

Eugene can keep its conservation and neighborhood values and still meet today’s housing need, but only if it rebuilds its land-use and permitting system around clear rules, real timelines and a public checkable record of what gets built.

Call that conservative urbanism: governing in-town change with predictable rules, short timelines and measurable results, and preserving public trust by making delivery checkable.

That delivery standard echoes Lane County Commissioner David Loveall’s State of the County theme that he delivered last week: whether government delivers public safety and results people can feel in daily life.

To keep its values without pricing families out or pushing them farther away, Eugene has to deliver enough homes for the people who live here and the people arriving.

Eugene’s Urban Growth Strategies work puts the need at about 26,000 homes over the next 20 years. That’s about 1,600 homes a year, and a roughly 70% increase over recent production. The city’s Housing Implementation Pipeline 2-year report shows a mixed delivery picture. Overall permitting is on track toward the city’s goal if application volumes hold. But the report also stresses that permits are not occupied homes and that, on the current trajectory, Eugene is unlikely to meet its income-qualified housing goal.

As I’ve worked on housing issues in Eugene — including serving on the city’s Multi-Unit Property Tax Exemption Review Panel — I’ve come to focus less on slogans and more on whether our governing systems actually deliver homes on predictable timelines. A 2024 New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof made a similar point about the gap between intentions and outcomes.

Again: not a party label, just a delivery standard.

Conservative urbanism treats housing delivery, public order and school outcomes as one shared test of government competence, fiscal honesty and civic stability. Fiscal honesty means naming costs up front and phasing reforms to match infrastructure capacity. Concretely, it means doing fewer things better: set clear rules, run the clock and publish results on what is allowed, what gets permitted and what actually gets built.

Under today’s tighter land and demand conditions, delay stopped being a planning preference and began showing up as displacement, longer commutes and households one financial emergency away from losing housing.

In Eugene, the problem shows up less in slogans than in process design: When decisions shift from clear, objective standards to discretionary reviews, timelines and appeal risks grow. For example, Eugene’s middle housing rules in the low-density residential zone generally allow duplexes (and regulate rowhouses), but they explicitly prohibit new duplexes and the creation of new rowhouse lots within the city-recognized boundaries of the Amazon, Fairmount and South University neighborhoods. As a result, discretion crept into processes that were supposed to be predictable. Housing proposals wound up in lengthy discretionary reviews.

Discretion is not the problem by itself. The problem is discretion without predictable standards and timelines. In theory, Eugene’s own land-use code audit describes a two-track system: clear and objective (checklist-style rules) versus discretionary review (a more subjective path). That distinction shapes timelines and appeal risk, and it can raise the cost of delay and uncertainty for projects.

In practice, these layers translate into avoidable financing risks and extra costs for builders long before a shovel hits the ground. When the path is long, discretionary and appealable, fewer projects may make financial sense on paper, and those that do move forward tend to land at the higher end of what the market can pay.

The consequences of that allowed-versus-delivered gap are now visible. In the first two years of the Housing Implementation Pipeline’s five-year tracking period (covering the 2023 and 2024 fiscal years), Eugene reported 2,385 new housing units permitted. That would put the city on track toward its target of 6,000 units permitted if application volumes remain consistent. It’s a useful sign of progress. But it’s only one stage of delivery.

But the same report signaled a harder truth about affordability: The current trajectory suggests the city will fall short of its income-qualified (below-market) housing target by the end of the tracking period. Permitting volume matters, but the mix matters too.

Permits are not starts, and starts are not completions. The city notes that permitted units can take several years to become occupied homes, and projects can slow for reasons beyond permitting, which is exactly why the city should not add avoidable uncertainty or delay.

At the end of 2025, Zillow’s Home Value Index put Eugene’s typical home value at about $461,000. That high baseline, combined with high interest rates and limited supply, keeps affordability tight. Interest rates, regional demand and construction costs all matter. The point here is that when delivery repeatedly falls short of identified need, scarcity stops being a market surprise and becomes a systems problem.

To be sure, Eugene’s procedural culture protected real goods. It preserved neighborhoods, safeguarded environmental assets and gave residents a meaningful voice in shaping the city they shared. Those achievements should not be dismissed.

The problem is that government institutions locked those values into rules and processes built for an earlier era, long after the conditions they were built for had changed.

This is what delivery means in practice, and it is the core insight behind conservative urbanism. It sets a practical standard for governing when demand is real and constraints are tight: clear, rule-based approvals for in-town housing (meet the code; get a timely yes), and shorter, more predictable permit timelines.

This is why delivery should be the standard: it makes costs visible and keeps process from standing in for results. We should stop treating layers of procedure as the work. Extra hearings, discretionary reviews and appealable decisions can stretch projects out for months or years. What matters is what actually happens: what gets approved, how long it takes and what actually gets built. When the city treats “we held meetings” as proof it did its job, process becomes a moral alibi for homes that don’t get built.

Conservative urbanism offers a demanding test: not whether plans exist or procedures were followed, but whether plans turn into keys, homes get built and streets function.

My next column will apply that test to the gap between what is allowed and what gets built, laying out a simple public scoreboard that residents can actually see: approvals, permits, starts, completions and the time between each stage. The third column will turn my diagnosis into a short, Eugene-ready reform package: rules over vetoes, plus regular public reporting so the delivery standard is not just a slogan, and can later be used to judge issues like public order and school outcomes, too.